Prosody in conversation

Project leader

Funding source

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ)

Project Details

Start date: 01/01/2009

End date: 31/12/2011

Funding: 5150000SEK

Description

The visionary goal for the researchers behind Prosody in conversation is to create an artificial conversational partner. While this is far beyond the scope of the project, this goal has already revealed black holes in our knowledge [MH1] concerning human conversations. For example, state-of-the-art speech technology neither sounds like a conversational partner, nor understands fundamental aspects of human conversational behavior.

Prosody in conversation aims at filling some of these black holes by studying features that are essential for as well as exclusive to conversations. More precisely, the project will explore how people talking to each other jointly decide ‘who should speak when' and the role of prosody - or the rhythm and melody of speech - for making such decisions.

The project will study acoustic prosodic features in genuine human- human conversations, as well as the effects of using or introducing such features in conversations. The latter type of studies will include manipulation of genuine conversations, as well as introduction of prosodic features (e.g. in talking computers) together with recordings of conversational behavior in response to such features, and subjective opinions of the effects of the features.

The cross-disciplinary research team has a solid background in the analysis of prosody in conversation.